Plant DNA barcodes: Applications today and in the future

Abstract

DNA barcodes have provided a new biological tool for organismal biologists to increase their understanding of the natural world. Over the last decade four plant DNA barcode markers, rbcL, matK, trnHpsbA, and ITS2, have been developed, tested, and used to address basic questions in systematics, ecology, evolutionary biology and conservation, including community assembly, species interaction networks, taxonomic discovery, and assessing priority areas for environmental protection. Forensic investigators have also applied these plant DNA barcodes in the regulatory areas of traffic in endangered species and monitoring commercial products, such as foods and herbal supplements. Major challenges ahead will focus on building the global plant DNA barcode library and adopting genomic sequencing technologies for a more efficient and costeffective workflow in applying these genetic identification markers to additional fields of biological and commercial endeavors.

Phylogenetic Taxonomy of Artemisia L. Species from Kazakhstan Based on Matk Analyses

“…The project combined efforts of local botanists and geneticists from biotechnology research organisations, botanical gardens, state nature parks, and reserves. In the last 20 years, DNA barcoding has shown itself as a powerful and efficient tool for sample identification and phylogeny of new and poorly studied species (Hebert et al, 2003;Hebert et al, 2005;Kress et al, 2017).…”

Awards of JSE Outstanding Papers (2016)

“…This study reviewed essential aspects of apomixis in ferns by three sections: (1) What Is Apomixis in Ferns? (2) As a supplementary tool to morphology-based taxonomy, the DNA barcoding technique has been successfully used to characterize biological diversity of vascular plants (Kress, 2017). This study presented a new set of 15 universal primer pairs for amplifying angiosperm whole chloroplast genomes to complement the nine primer pairs that the authors published previously (Yang et al, 2014).…”

EMBL2checklists: A Python package to facilitate the user-friendly submission of plant DNA barcoding sequences to ENA

“…Introduction non-coding, nuclear vs. organellar origin), a series of pre-tailored spreadsheets (hereafter 22 "checklists") was developed by ENA, each with its idiosyncratic, tab-delimited fields of 23 information. Users of ENA must choose the correct spreadsheet for their data 24 submission (Fig.…”

“…67 Plant DNA barcoding is a key method to identify and characterize botanical 68 specimens, and the resulting DNA sequences are well suited for a streamlined and 69 automated conversion to marker-specific Webin checklists. The identification and 70 characterization of plant specimens via the sequencing of specific genome regions 71 ("plant DNA barcodes"; [22]) have become a key method in botanical research [23].…”